Category Archives: Roswell

Comparing the actual evidence to the Canadian claim of best evidence for alien visitation.

They call it “Canada’s Roswell”, supposedly the strongest evidence of extraterrestrial visitation ever in Canada. It happened at Shag Harbour, a small fishing port near the extreme southern tip of Nova Scotia. On the clear night of Wednesday, October 4, 1967, shortly before midnight, a number of witnesses observed a row of lights, said to be on a craft about 60 feet long, descend with a bomb-like whistling sound, hover above the water for a moment, and then submerge. Emergency crews responded to what they thought was a plane crash. Divers spent a few days scouring the harbor bottom, but found nothing. But then, a quarter of a century later, the story exploded into something the like of which we’d never seen. The Shag Harbour UFO became one of the best cases ever for proof of alien visitation… supposedly.

On the night the incident was reported, Coast Guard and civilian boats swarmed Shag Harbour looking for what they hoped would be plane crash survivors. All that was found was a patch of foam, described by the fishing boat captain who saw it as “At least 80 feet wide”, and that in the darkness he thought it was “yellowish in color.” Divers spent three days combing the bottom of the bay in the area where everyone thought the crash had happened, but they found nothing at all.

Often cited as the reason that Shag Harbour should be considered Canada’s best evidence for alien visitation is the number and reliability of the witnesses. The lights descending into the water were reported by about a dozen people, including a Mountie. Two more Mounties and a few other people called to the scene reported seeing one light bobbing in the water for a short time.

Another reason it’s cited as an important case is that a few other UFO reports were made in the weeks before and after this one in various parts of the province. But in fact, rather than strengthening the case, it dilutes and complicates it.

These purported UFO documents changed the course of the culture of UFO belief.

The Majestic 12 documents are the Holy Bible of UFO enthusiasts. These documents, which appear to be declassified official US government memos written in 1947, confirm everything believed by many in the UFO community: that the United States knows all about aliens visiting the Earth in their flying saucers. Many say the documents are a hoax; others say the hoax claimants are all a part of the coverup. But no matter what’s true, Majestic 12 has had a major impact on the entire course of UFO belief in popular culture. Today we’re going to see if we can learn where they came from.

In December of 1984, a manila envelope dropped through the mail slot in the front door of Jaime Shandera, a writer and UFO researcher. It contained a roll of 35mm film. The postmark on the envelope told him little; it was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, but there was no return address or indication of who might have sent it or what it was. Shandera called his partner in UFO research, author Bill Moore. They developed the film, and found that each frame was a photograph of a page of a document. Printed out, it formed what’s become known as the Majestic 12 documents, usually abbreviated MJ-12.

The document purported to be a memo written in 1952 by the director of the CIA, advising President Eisenhower of the existence of a group of twelve scientists and military officials who were assembled in 1947 on the orders of President Truman to investigate the crash of the flying saucer in Roswell. The memo advised the President of the importance of the Majestic 12 group, and suggested that the project be continued.

Moore and Shandera decided to keep the documents secret, sharing them only with a select few UFO researchers, including Stanton Friedman, the original author of the Roswell mythology. Word began to leak out to the UFO community that some documents existed, but Moore, Shandera, and Friedman weren’t sharing. In 1986, an anonymous source described the documents to British UFO author Jenny Randles, but she declined them. In 1987, the documents were received anonymously by another British UFO author, Timothy Good. He published them in his book Above Top Secret. Moore realized the time for secrecy was past, and he went public with them at a UFO conference in June of that year. Suddenly everyone knew about MJ-12, and even the mainstream media reported on them.

Skeptical UFO author Philip Klass sent a copy of the documents to the FBI, which immediately investigated their authenticity. In their report dated December 1988, the FBI stated:

The Office of Special Investigations, US Air Force, advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus.

Of course, even if the document was authentic, its widespread public availability might well persuade the government to claim that it is bogus. How is one to know? A useful exercise might be to look at the wider context in which the document was delivered to UFO authors.

You say you believe the government is hiding something at Area 51–captured alien spacecraft, perhaps? The conjectures and rumors surrounding Area 51 comprise a revered conspiracy theory (many theories, actually). Do you believe the aliens among us are the hidden driving force in human history? That top world leaders (and they aren’t who most people think they are!) are cooperating for personal gain with the alien “reptile overlords” to bring about the enslavement of our species? You might be a conspiracist.

You might buy into one or more conspiracy theories without being an all-out conspiracist. Conspiracism is a world view that sees history as driven primarily by interwoven webs of secret conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are leaner, more restrained, more limited in scope than conspiracism. A conspiracy theory alleges that a secret conspiracy involving hidden actors is behind particular historical events. Its explanation for events usually runs counter to the official or mainstream account, which is itself seen as an elaborate fabrication.

Test your favorite conspiracy against the following components typical of conspiracism and conspiracy theories:

THEY (the conspirators) are a relatively small group, but powerful and corrupt. They are evil, or at least selfish, acting in their own interest and against the public interest. They have great foresight, patience, and deviousness. Nevertheless, they are not all-powerful or even that smart, really, since WE have figured them out.

WE are a small, dedicated group of freedom fighters and freethinkers. We are soldiers, rebels in the fight for good against evil.

YOU are clueless. Why can’t you see what’s going on here? (Conspiracy theorists place most people in this group.)

THEY have hidden or destroyed all the evidence that would implicate them and have manufactured false evidence that exculpates them.

YOU are close-minded. In fact, you are probably one of THEM.

The comfort of conspiracy theory is that it provides a well-defined enemy and a sense of control (or at least structure) in the face of upheaval and disempowerment; the tendency to perceive conspiracy is more common in groups experiencing social isolation or political marginalization. The freedom fighters of conspiracy theory need not see themselves as being at the mercy of irresistible, inexplicable, or random natural or social forces, but as soldiers in a just cause. Many, if not most, conspiracy theories probably result from the human tendency to look for pattern in chaos-even if there isn’t any.

Conspiracy theories and conspiracism share three problems:

Unfalsifiability

Fallacy

Naivete

Unfalsifiability

The main problem with any particular conspiracy theory is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s inarguable; not that it’s false, but that it is unfalsifiable. Because it is unfalsifiable, a conspiracy theory is not provable or disprovable.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency uploaded hundreds of UFO ‘X-Files’ on their website. The declassified files include never-before-seen top secret files detailing the agency’s work on UFO investigations from the late 1940s to the 1950s.(Photo : Marc Brüneke | Flickr)

Worldwide UFO fans will sure have field day because the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) decided to release hundreds of X-files-like UFO documents on their website. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to see any evidence of intergalactic limbs or crashed UFO sites.

There are, however, hundreds of declassified documents about the agency’s top secret UFO investigations dating from the late 1940s and the 1950s. Many conspiracy theorists point to the CIA, saying that the agency has been involved in many cover ups of UFO sightings to hide the truth from the general public.For some reason, the agency has decided to upload never-before-seen photos and documents in PDF formats.

Among the CIA’s UFO X-Files is the sighting documented by New Jersey resident George Stock. On July 29, 1952 at about 4:30 p.m., Stock and his friend John H. Riely spotted a bizarre aircraft approaching from the sky.

They were allegedly in Stock’s backyard when the strange phenomenon took place. Stock ran inside his house, grabbed his camera and managed to take five clear photos of the disc-shaped, metallic-like object in the sky before it flew away.

Despite the authenticity of the uploaded CIA documents, the agency kept referring to Agents Mulder and Scully of the famous drama series The X-Files.

The term “flying saucer” conjures up images of campy science fiction films from the 50s and 60s, with people in shiny metallic suits backed by experimental electronic music. They were something of a national obsession for a while, with “saucers” reported in the sky manned by everyone from Russians to little green men. Air Force pilots chased them to their doom, and occasionally they would crash and spawn legends like Roswell. It turns out that the true genesis of flying saucer folklore is at least as fascinating as any of the fables themselves, and a worthy place to turn our skeptical eye.

Most historians of the strange trace flying saucers back to a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold, who had an encounter while flying his small plane in Washington state on June 24, 1947. His was not especially unusual; UFOs had always been reported, and there was nothing new about aliens; this was nearly a decade after Orson Welles’ famous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. Arnold’s story was merely the first time the term “saucer” had been used, when it was reported in the East Oregonian newspaper the next day, on June 25:

He said he sighted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation at 3. p.m. yesterday, extremely bright — as if they were nickel plated — and flying at an immense rate of speed. He estimated they were at an altitude between 9,500 and 10,000 feet and clocked them from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Adams, arriving at the amazing speed of about 1200 miles an hour. “It seemed impossible,” he said, “but there it is — I must believe my eyes.”

Arnold’s story was syndicated and made his story famous, at least in the general public’s eye; as far as the UFO literature was concerned, his story made him immortal. Buoyed by the attention, UFO stories began to get traction in the newspapers, like any trending topic. Here’s an example of one from July 8, less than two weeks later:

The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.

According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises…

After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters.

The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer’s construction or its appearance had been revealed.

This one may sound familiar to you. It is, of course, the original newspaper article that launched the Roswell canon of alien lore.

You can see Janet airplanes at several airports throughout the U.S. You can hear them on air traffic control. You can fly one in Microsoft Flight Simulator X. But you can’t buy a ticket on a Janet flight, and the people who fly on Janet flights can’t tell you, or even their families, what they do for work. It is seemingly an airline that flies to nowhere.

The multi-tiered secrecy surrounding the Janet jets, the unusual ways they operate and the places they go are one of aviation’s greatest legends. If it all seems like a big clandestine operation, that’s because it is.

Why is there a fleet of unmarked airliners at a guarded private terminal in Las Vegas? Where do they fly? Who flies aboard them? Even though these aircraft service the seemingly impenetrable top secret defense world, we can provide some answers.

No, “Janet Airlines” isn’t the shadowy carrier’s official name. That name stuck and became widely accepted once aviation enthusiasts discovered that the curious aircraft based out of a small private terminal (code named “Gold Coast”) on the west side of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas use the callsign “Janet” while operating in civilian airspace.

It’s when Janet flights cross from civilian airspace into restricted military airspace that things get really interesting. One of the places these Janet 737’s go is located inside the airspace described as R-4808N on the map below. “The Box,” or “The Container,” as R-4808N is known, is off-limits. It is restricted airspace within restricted airspace, and incursions into its sanctum are most unwelcome. And yet, the unassuming white and red 737’s are shepherded through routinely, where they disappear before reappearing after different lengths of time.

On takeoff from Las Vegas, Janet flights communicate with McCarran Departure Control using a callsign like “Janet 210,” or “Janet 301.” Once airborne, the Janet proceeds northwest and McCarran Departure hands them off to Nellis Control. Nellis Control supervises the busy airspace across the southern part of Nevada.

The archive of more than 12,000 UFO sightings is not the smoking gun to prove alleged sightings of flying saucers and little green men, but it’s a historical asset that chronicles decades of people mistaking meteors for something more.

“Proved to be practical joke perpetrated by one (redacted) … apparatus consisting of eighteen inch aluminum disk,” a July 7, 1947, report states. “Electrical condensers and wire was made in machine shop … and tossed from bldg (sic) into street as joke on (redacted).”

Though most of the reports perused by the Daily News meander toward the mundane — sightings of meteors blazing across the sky and weather balloons bobbing beyond the horizon — there are some gems.

Civilians and members of the military near Walker Air Force Base near Roswell, N.M., kept calling in UFO reports after the 1947 incident.

“People have this fascination when it comes to UFOs. We can have our speculation that it’s top secret, but we simply don’t know,” Greenewald, of the Black Vault website, told the Daily News.

The entire collection obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests spans more than two decades of digitized and searchable reports. It’s hosted on Greenewald’s site dedicated to sharing government documents.

Did aliens visit the ancient Earth and inspire human cultures? Some people claim so.

UFO enthusiasts often cite June 24, 1947 as the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon. On that day, Kenneth Arnold coined the term “flying saucer” for the unidentified objects he saw flying past Mount Rainier, and sparked the public’s interest in the idea of alien visitors from another world. But what if aliens had arrived on Earth sooner than that? What if they arrived a lot sooner? That’s the basis of the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis, which suggests that alien visitors have been coming to earth for not just decades, but centuries, and maybe even millennia.

Click the image to visit Ancient Aliens Debunked

Notions of an Earth visited the ancient past by aliens from another world date back at least a century. In many ways, the Cthulhu mythos, H. P. Lovecraft’s famous mythology of Great Old Ones from deep space who come to Earth and build eons-old cities, is an iteration of the Ancient Astronaut idea. In fact, it’s quite possible that Lovecraft’s stories greatly influenced Morning of the Magicians, a nonfiction French book written in the 1960s that give serious consideration to the idea of Ancient Astronauts visiting the Earth.

If you’ve heard of the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis, however, the man you probably have to thank for it is Swiss author Erich Von Daniken. In 1968, Von Daniken drew on various ideas of ancient aliens, probably including the ideas expressed in Morning of the Magicians, and turned them into a book called Chariots of the Gods? In doing so, he launched the modern Ancient Astronaut hypothesis.

The argument put forth in Chariots of the Gods? is rooted in Clarke’s Third Law, which says that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”” In fact, the second chapter of Chariots of the Gods? sets the stage for the book with precisely that argument. Von Daniken asks readers to imagine what would happen if human spacefarers ever visited a distant world that was populated with a primitive alien culture. He argues that these primitive aliens would lack the vocabulary and knowledge to understand our advanced technology. Instead, they would view their human visitors as divine beings capable of incredible magic.

When our spaceship disappears again into the mists of the universe, our friends will talk about the miracle — “the gods were here!” They will translate it into their simple language and turn it into a saga to be handed down to their sons and daughters.

It’s from this premise, Von Daniken spun his theory: that if other spacefarers visited our primitive Earth cultures, then we too would view them as miraculous gods. And in fact they did visit, he argues, as evidenced by the great works that these primitive cultures simply could not have made on their own and the strange drawings and myths these cultures left behind.

Chariots of the Gods? was a bestseller, as were Von Daniken’s follow-up books with titles like Gods from Outer Space and In Search of Ancient Gods. They created a widespread public awareness of the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis that persists to this day.

Popularity doesn’t equate to quality, of course, and the book itself is full of flawed and spurious logic. As just one example . . .

For over half a century the Roswell alien conspiracy has tantalized the taste buds, captured the imagination, and provided substantial foil for the tin hats of conspiracy theorists worldwide.

Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles north west of Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The debris was identified as that of a radar target.

No-one has really provided a definite answer to what exactly happened on that fateful July 8 night in 1947 when a sleepy little backwater town in New Mexico became the focal point of the biggest extraterrestrial hunt in history.

Did a flying saucer really crash into the desert near Roswell? Or was it nothing more than a downed surveillance balloon as the U.S. military claimed at the time? Were there really aliens, both alive and dying scattered amongst the wreckage, and was the technology discovered at the site responsible for the creation of the iPhone? Who knows?

Although Roswell has been called “the world’s most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim,” it still generates more interest than you can shake a JFK shaped stick at.

Karl Pflock once wrote, “The case for Roswell is a classic example of the triumph of quantity over quality. The advocates of the crashed-saucer tale simply shovel everything that seems to support their view into the box marked ‘Evidence’ and say, ‘See? Look at all this stuff. We must be right.’ Never mind the contradictions. Never mind the lack of independent supporting fact. Never mind the blatant absurdities.

“The UFO field is comprised of people who are willing to take advantage of the gullibility of others, especially the paying public. Let’s not pull any punches here: The Roswell UFO myth has been very good business for UFO groups, publishers, for Hollywood, the town of Roswell, the media, and UFOlogy. The number of researchers who employ science and its disciplined methodology is appallingly small.”

Pflock might be interested to know that a new German documentary claims that Roswell has nothing at all to do with aliens, but absolutely everything to do with the Nazis.

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

If you wish to conduct more investigating into this subject matter i highly recommend visiting ART and UFOs? No Thanks, Only Art. The website is written in Italian, but some pages have been translated into English. The Italian pages are translated using MicroSoft Translator:

The items on this varied list may not all warrant heightened vigilance and tin foil hats, but better safe than sorry. So we’re all better prepared for welcoming the Lizard People, when they finally choose to reveal themselves, and assimilating to the New World Order, here are some of the best conspiracy theories and urban legends in the U.S.

10 • Area 51, probably underground, Nev.

Arguably, the country’s most famous conspiracy theory is focused on this remote part of Edwards Air Force Base in Southern Nevada. Also known as Groom Lake, it’s assumed the base is used to test aircraft and weapons systems. The air space overhead is absolutely restricted. Even Air Force pilots aren’t allowed to breach the perimeter. The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the base has fueled several Area 51 conspiracy theories over the years ranging from a lab/prison for studying aliens (both living and dead), a meeting place for Earthlings and aliens working in tandem on various projects, reverse engineering and testing of captured/recovered alien technology, developing a weather control system, time travel and teleportation technology and much more. All that said, nothing can be certain as everything that occurs in Area 51 is classified as “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.” The CIA didn’t publicly acknowledge the existence of the base until July 2013.

9 • Denver Airport, Colo.

A detail of a mural in Denver International Airport, subject of much conspiracy theorist interest. A plea for peace, or a plan for future martial law?

Another conspiracy theory layer cake spot is Denver International Airport. That it was built while Denver had a perfectly good airport much closer to the city is the jumping off point for these theories. (For the record, experts have pointed out that the runway layout at the old airport was no longer efficient enough for the increased traffic.) It’s believed that building the new airport allowed for the secret construction of an underground headquarters for the Illuminati, or the New World Order, or the Neo-Nazis, or the Lizard People and so on. The vaguely Swastika-shaped runways, the (admittedly) disturbing murals and sculptures, and odd words engraved in the floor also fuel the theories. Furthermore, there is the question of funding. A stone in the terminal says the airport was funded by “The New World Airport Commission,” a nebulous entity, sanely theorized to be a group of local businesses, though many claim it doesn’t exist.

8 • UFO cover-up, Roswell, N.M.

Though it’s now mainly fueled by local businesses wanting to cash in on tourist interest, the (alleged!) Roswell UFO incident of 1947 is the most popular (alleged!) UFO cover-up of all time and still merits time and energy among conspiracy theorists and movie/TV writers. Various people claim that a spacecraft with alien occupants crashed on a ranch near Roswell in June or July 1947, which was quietly hauled away for study, possibly by our friends at Area 51. The Air Force reported at the time that the object was a surveillance balloon. The conspiracy chatter didn’t flare up until 1978 when Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved with the recovery of the debris, gave an interview describing a spacecraft crash cover-up by the military. Since then additional witnesses have emerged, describing the cover-up and alien autopsies. These days, even passionate pro-UFO advocates generally dismiss Roswell as a hoax.

7 • Grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas

The grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, where the 1963 assasination of US President John F. Kennedy took place in Dallas.

The Warren Commission concluded that there was no conspiracy involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. However, after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, an event that also brims with conspiracy, the theories that Oswald didn’t act alone or maybe wasn’t involved at all started flying. The situation was exacerbated in 1979 when the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations announced “…a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President.” Furthermore, while he was living in Belarus, it’s said Oswald was such a terrible shot that friends were afraid to go hunting with him. The dazzling list of conspiracy theories put forward at one point or another involve the collusion of one or more parties including the CIA, the FBI and/or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups, Castro himself, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the KGB.

6 • Kensington Runestone, Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn.

Kensington Runestone

Evidence that Scandinavian explorers pushed as far as the Midwest of the future United States in the 14th century or a 19th-century hoax? The Kensington Runestone is a 200 lb slab of greywacke inscribed with runes on the face and side. The story goes the stone was found in 1898 in the rural township of Solem, Minnesota (it gets its name from Kensington, a nearby settlement) by Swedish immigrant Olof Olsson Ohman. The Stone appears to describe an expedition of Norwegians and Swedes who camped in the area, then retreated to their boat at “the inland sea” after 10 were slaughtered by unknown assailants. Runologists and linguistic experts overwhelming agree that the language used on the stone is too modern (circa the 19th century, coincidentally) and didn’t match other writing samples from the 1300s. However, the legend persists, being occasionally revived with new evidence and arguments, some as recently the 1990s.

The only unsolved case of air piracy in U.S. history was perpetrated by an unidentified man who the media came to call “D. B. Cooper.” (The hijacker purchased his ticket using the alias “Dan Cooper.”) On November 24, 1971, Cooper hijacked a passenger plane (a Boeing 727) during a Portland-Seattle flight. Claiming he had a bomb, he made his ransom plans known to the crew. On the ground in Seattle, Cooper released the passengers after officials gave him the requested $200,000 (equivalent to $1,160,000 today) and two parachutes. With only Cooper and the crew aboard, the plane then took off heading for Mexico. When they stopped in Reno to refuel, Cooper was gone, having jumped from the rear stairs while the plane was likely still over Washington State. Cooper was never found and it’s widely believe he couldn’t have possibly survived the fall, over remote mountainous wilderness, at night, wearing a trench coat and loafers, no helmet, into an initial wind chill at the airplane’s altitude of “70∞ F. The FBI investigation into the case remains open to this day.

Governments and militaries have secret bases; that’s just a simple fact. But usually the part that’s secret only concerns what’s done there; the actual existence of the facility itself is not usually in question. It’s kind of hard to hide a big complex of buildings. Even NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain command center, which exists entirely inside a mountain in Colorado, is marked with plenty of obvious external infrastructure. Since governments own the land and control access, there’s not really any reason to try and hide the facilities within. Satellite eyes in the sky observe everything being constructed anyway, so other governments will always know there’s something there whether the final product is hidden or not. And yet, stories remain about certain secret establishments. Let’s take a look at eight of these.

This super-secret military base in the UK is said to have performed all sorts of illegal and unethical human experimentation:

1. Porton Down

Real. It’s there in Wiltshire, England, freely available for anyone to drive past or view on Google Earth. Porton Down was formed during World War I, a time when wars were fought with poison gas. Their main focus was to develop gas mask technology, and to create better ways of deploying gases against the enemy. Such horrible weapons as mustard gas and chlorine were routinely used here.

Porton Down’s darkest legacy, and the main reason for its reputation, comes from its cold war years. At the same time that the Americans were experimenting with LSD in the MKULTRA program, Porton Down was doing the same, administering LSD to servicemen without their consent, in an effort to develop mind control and interrogation techniques. Human experimentation was also done, resulting in at least one death and a number of later lawsuits, using the nerve agents VX and sarin, and the endotoxin pyrexal.

And what about that favorite grandaddy of all secret bases:

2. Area 51

Real. The biggest confusion with Area 51 is that it has nothing to do with Roswell, NM or the alleged 1947 saucer crash. They’re in different states, and Area 51 hadn’t even been built yet; so there wasn’t much reason for any dead aliens to have been brought there. It was built in the 1950s, mainly to develop the super-secret A-12 and SR-71 reconaissance planes. Nobody actually calls it Area 51, it’s usually informally called The Ranch and formally the National Classified Test Facility. Contrary to popular rumors, the military doesn’t now, or in the past, deny its existence. That big word “classified” in its name simply means they don’t discuss what happens there.

Much of its history has since been declassified, and nothing has really surprised anyone who works in aviation journalism. Most secret American aircraft that were classified before they became publicly known, such as the A-12, SR-71, F-117, and TACIT BLUE have been tested and developed there. That’s why it’s out in the middle of nowhere, safely hidden behind off-limits mountains.

A Google Earth study of Area 51 shows that activity has dropped off a lot there in recent years, probably because all the attention and budgets are shifting toward unmanned craft.

But if the aliens weren’t taken to Area 51, maybe they were taken to this alleged underground facility in New Mexico, home to gray aliens and reptilian beings:

3. Dulce Base

Fictional. Despite its having been featured in a number of television shows, comic books, and novels, there is no evidence that any underground “base” of any kind exists inside Archuleta Mesa, about 5 km north of the city of Dulce, NM. It’s frequently referenced on UFO web sites and conspiracy web sites, and usually described as a joint operation between aliens and the US military. The story began when a local UFO enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, believed he was receiving radio transmissions from underneath the mesa in the 1970s. Within a few years, another UFO fan, Phil Schneider, claimed to have been an employee there, and has given detailed descriptions of its 7-level underground structure, its population of 18,000 aliens, and descriptions of the terrible experiments they perform on human subjects. It also supposedly has an underground train connection to Los Alamos National Laboratory, 130 kilometers away.

It’s trivial to study Google Earth images of Archuleta Mesa and see that there’s nothing there at all, certainly nothing like Schneider’s elaborate descriptions that include surface buildings and radar installations. And that no subway exists between there and Los Alamos. It also seems a little suspicious that Phil Schneider would be freely allowed to go around talking about his supposedly top-secret job. For a great discussion of All Things Dulce, see the Skeptoid blog article on the web site.

Some say that the United States maintains an underwater Area 51 in the Bahamas. It’s called:

Real. The US Navy’s Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center is on Andros Island in the Bahamas, and it was once hyped by History Channel’s TV show UFO Hunters as being some kind of secret alien underwater thing. The employees there thought the show was pretty funny; they had a viewing party and sent me a photo of them goofing around and wearing tinfoil hats. Seriously.

AUTEC isn’t underwater. It’s better described as a beach resort, with a small protected harbor and a boatramp and wharf, and the obligatory beach club with cabana bar. Although the Navy does not disclose the nature of their specific projects, it does freely list their assets and capabilities. They’re concerned with underwater warfare, mainly torpedos and mines. They also dabble quite a lot in unmanned underwater vehicles, electronic warfare, and acoustics. Their principal ship is called the Range Rover; it goes out and does most of the grunt work, often at their Shallow Water Range and Minefield about 120 km north of Andros Island. It’s a very thoroughly surveyed plot of real estate, and most useful when they’re not dodging the cruise ships that are constantly pounding back and forth through the channel.

And while we’re underwater, what do we think of the plausibility of a gigantic underground submarine base in China?

In July of that year, a balloon train came down on the Foster Ranch, 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. Rancher “Mac” Brazel, who had been reading about flying saucers, reported it to the local Sheriff, who in turn reported a crashed flying saucer to a Major Jesse Marcel at Roswell Army Air Field, but not before the local press heard about it. The debris, totaling some five pounds of foil and aluminum and described in detail by Mac Brazel, was recovered by officials from Roswell Army Air Field. These balloon trains were long ultra low frequency antennas designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests, held aloft by a large number of balloons, and were known as Project Mogul. With Marcel’s press release in hand, the Roswell Daily Record reported that a Flying Saucer was captured, and the following day, printed a correction that it was merely a weather balloon, along with an interview with Mac Brazel, who deeply regretted all the unwanted publicity generated by his misidentification.

It should be stressed that this was the end of the incident, and nothing further was said or done by anyone, until 1978 (that’s 31 years in which nobody remembered or said anything), when the National Enquirer, on what must have been a slow news day, reported the original uncorrected news article from the Roswell Daily Record. UFO fans went nuts. Stanton Friedman, a longtime UFO proponent, started interviewing everyone he could find who was still alive who had been connected with the incident and began constructing all sorts of elaborate conspiracies. These primarily centered around Major Marcel, who agreed that Friedman’s assertion was possible — that the government was covering up an actual alien spacecraft.

Two years later in 1980, UFO proponents William Moore and Charles Berlitz published The Roswell Incident. There wasn’t much new information in this book, it was essentially a collection of suppositions and interviews with a few people who were still alive, or their relatives. Even so, by this point, it’s important to note that the story really had not grown beyond the question of what debris had actually been recovered from the Foster Ranch in 1947.

Upon the book’s publication, the National Enquirer tracked down Marcel and published their own interview with him. This was all well and good, but since there still wasn’t any new information or any evidence that Roswell was anything other than the Project Mogul balloon, things quieted down for a long time.

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

From faked lunar landings to invisible WWII warships, here are six conspiracy theories and the genre films they inspired…

“Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face,” Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D Ripper coldly announces in Stanley Kubrick’s breathtakingly funny satire, Dr Strangelove.

Ripper’s conspiracy theory, that the commies are secretly trying to compromise our “precious bodily fluids”, becomes his harebrained reason for unleashing a missile strike on the USSR. And just as Ripper was inspired by this strange notion to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, so filmmakers have been inspired by conspiracy theories to make all kinds of science fiction and horror movies – some funny, some tense and absorbing, others terrifying.

Here, then, is a selection of six real-world conspiracy theories and the varied movies they inspired – and funnily enough, Stanley Kubrick even pops up in one of the more familiar entries…

1. The Philadelphia experiment

The conspiracy: The story goes that, during the chaos of World War II, a group of scientists working for the US navy were carrying out an experiment that could have altered the face of the battle completely: they were attempting to make a warship invisible. The warship in question was the USS Eldridge, docked in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and the experiment supposedly took place in October 1943.

A scientist named Dr Franklin Reno was said to be the mind behind the project, having taken inspiration from Einstein’s unified field theory – and according to the legend, it was a success. Not only was the ship rendered invisible, but in subsequent experiments, apparently teleported to another location 200 miles away and back again.

The experiment wasn’t without its side-effects, however; sailors were said to have suffered from a range of ailments, including nausea, mental trauma, invisibility and spontaneous combustion. It’s even said that some sailors were found partly embedded in the structure of the ship itself.

For its part, the US navy has always denied that the Philadelphia experiment ever took place, but this has merely added to the claims that the incident was covered up. Despite repeated counter-claims that the experiment is a mixture of hoax and misheard information (the navy really were looking at ways of making ships undetectable to magnetic torpedoes at the time, which could have somehow been misinterpreted as ‘invisible’), the legend’s endured, partly thanks to books like The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility.

The obvious question, though, is if the US navy managed to make a ship invisibile so long ago, why hasn’t this technology become widespread since? The supporters of the conspiracy would probably argue that the US navy uses invisibility all the time – we just can’t see the evidence.

The movies: “The experiment that should never have happened 41 years ago is still going on,” read the tagline to The Philadelphia Experiment, which took the legend and turned it into a time-travel adventure-romance. Michael Pare and Bobby Di Cicco play two sailors aboard the USS Eldridge who find themselves thrown 40 years into the future by the experiment, and then have to figure out a means of closing off a rift in time and space that could destroy the entire planet.

Although not a big hit at the time of release, The Philadelphia Experiment is almost as persistent as the legend behind it: a belated sequel materialised in 1993, while a made-for-TV remake appeared on the Syfy Channel in 2012. The Philadelphia Experiment is also a good example of how urban legends perpetuate themselves through storytelling.

In the late 1980s, a chap named Al Bielek happened to catch a showing of the 1984 Philadelphia Experiment movie on television, which he claimed dislodged repressed memories of his own involvement in the 1943 project. In later interviews, he not only stated that he’d been a sailor aboard the USS Eldritch, but also that he’d been sent forward in time to the year 1983. Mind you, Bielek also claimed to have taken a time tunnel to Mars, conversed with aliens, travelled forward in time to the year 2137, and back to the year 100,000 BC. Bielek’s claims then appeared to inspire the makers of the film 100,000 BC, a straight-to-video action film where members of the Philadelphia Experiment go back to the time of the dinosaurs.

Like a feedback loop, legends grow and change as they’re told and retold.

2. The Roswell incident

Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles north west of Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The debris was identified as that of a radar target.

The conspiracy: On the 8th July 1947, the Roswell Daily Record ran a front page story which read, “RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region”. The US military later retracted their initial statement, saying instead that the debris they’d collected was from a crashed weather balloon rather than a unidentified flying object, but it was too late – one of the most discussed and famous conspiracy theories was born.

Accusations that the American government had recovered a flying saucer – or at least parts of one – grew in the years that followed, and stories began to circulate that living occupants of the craft had been taken to Area 51 (a now infamous military base) in New Mexico. By the 1990s, a range of books, eye-witness accounts, TV documentaries and even purported footage of alien autopsies had all materialised, all appearing to lend weight to the theory that the US government was hiding knowledge of flying saucers and visitors from outer space.

The movies: Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) remains one of the most lavish and well-made films to deal with the UFO phenomenon, taking in sightings of lights in the sky, abduction by aliens, and also the topic of a conspiracy on the part of the US government. Close Encounters’ conclusion even suggests that America’s scientists have engaged in some kind of foreign exchange program with visiting aliens, as Richard Dreyfuss’ blue-collar hero clambers into a cathedral-like ship for a ride into the unknown.

The 1986 adventure film Flight Of The Navigator may also have taken a hint of inspiration from the Roswell incident and other stories like it, as a young boy takes a ride in a crashed, metallic UFO secretly held by NASA. Vaguely echoing what theorists argue happened in 1943, Flight Of The Navigator’s scientists had whisked the ship from public view and attempted to cover up the craft’s true nature by describing it to the police as an experimental space laboratory.

Interest in the Roswell incident began to rise again in the 1990s, possibly due to the publication of several books which brought forth new claims of downed saucers and conspiracies. One of these would become Roswell, a 1994 TV movie starring Kyle MacLachlan as a US major attempting to uncover the hidden truth about the crash. The quest for uncovering buried truths also provided the basis for The X-Files, Chris Carter’s TV series that received a movie spin-off (itself about aliens and government cover-ups) in 1998.

Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) made explicit use of Roswell lore; amid the destruction of an alien invasion, it’s eventually revealed to Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore that the military really had captured an alien space craft and three occupants in 1947, and that they’d been stored and studied for the past 49 years at Area 51. The repaired space craft then came in handy for the third act, where it was used to plant a computer virus in the invaders’ mother ship – a plot point that’s still derided by some movie geeks 18 years later.

About 12 months before Independence Day came out, a piece of black-and-white footage purportedly shot at Area 51 first appeared on television. Appearing to depict the autopsy of a humanoid creature, the 17-minute film caused an immediate fuss in the media, despite widespread suspicions that it was a hoax.

The chap who first brought the film to the public’s attention, a British entrepreneur named Ray Santilli, later admitted that the footage had been faked, but insisted that it was based on some real film he’d seen a few years earlier – when the film degraded past the point where it was watchable, Santilli said he’d funded a reconstruction of what he’d previously witnessed. The whole curious incident became the basis of the 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy, starring British TV entertainment duo Ant and Dec.

If you want an example of how one single event can inspire a range of stories, look no further than the Roswell incident.

In the past few decades, this perfectly ordinary military base in the middle of the desert in southern Nevada has taken on mythic status. Most military bases have tight security, and only authorized military personnel and their contractors are allowed on base. This particular base is top secret, with much tighter security than most military land. Not only is it surrounded by a secured perimeter and motion detectors in the ground, but the guards travel the perimeter regularly, and have video security cameras monitoring everything that comes near the fence. It is also located in one of the most remote areas of sparsely populated Nevada, more than two hours of driving north out of Las Vegas. Because there is no way to see the base from the paved road, even from the highest peaks outside the base except Tikaboo Peak (a long hard desert hike), it can only be viewed from the air or from space. Naturally, that high level of secrecy has led to all sorts of speculation about what happens there, and an entire industry of books and movies and TV shows which need only mention the phrase “Area 51” and immediately their audience assumes that there are aliens or some kinds of weird government experiments going on there.

First of all, let’s clarify one misconception: the proper name of the base. Some of the common names of the base are “Groom Lake” or “Homey Airport” on civilian aeronautics maps, or the longer “Nevada Test and Training Range” in CIA documents, but the older CIA documents do use the term “Area 51”. The name “Area 51” was indirectly named from the old grid system the Atomic Energy Commission used in the 1950s and 1960s to map the Nevada Test Site and the associated air bases. The original grid system numbering did not go as high as 51, but the Groom Lake area was purchased later and added to the secured perimeter of the base near Area 15 of the original grid; it is speculated that they just reversed 15 to 51 to get the number for the newly annexed area. The area has acquired additional security nicknames used to hide the true nature of the place, such as “Paradise Ranch”, the name that Lockheed Aircraft designer Kelly Johnson used to attract workers to project. According to Alexander Aciman in Time magazine:

Area 51 was cheekily nicknamed Paradise Ranch, so that intelligence officers and government employees wouldn’t have to tell their wives that they were moving the family to a rather large fenced-off area in the desert.

The U-2 spy plane, secretly built by Lockheed and the CIA and tested at Area 51

Other names include the CIA name “Watertown” (a reference to Watertown, New York, birthplace of CIA Director Allen Dulles), and “Dreamland Resort,” “Red Square,” “The Box,” or just “The Ranch”. After the U.S. Air Force took over the base from the CIA in the late 1970s, the name “Area 51” was discontinued, and it was called Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center (or simply Det. 3, AFFTC). As such, it was a remote operating location of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Today the official name of the Groom Lake base appears to be the National Classified Test Facility. The Test Wing (Det. 3, AFFTC) is still the primary occupant of the site.

There is also an Area 52. It is another name for the secret airfield and testing facility near Tonopah, Nevada, about 70 miles (110 km) northwest of Groom Lake. Many of the same aircraft that were developed and tested at Area 51 have their official base of operations at Area 52, especially the stealth aircraft.

For many decades, the activities in the base were top secret, so most of what was written about it was sheer guesswork or based on the reports of people who had worked there and spilled some of their information.

Paul Hellyer was Canada’s Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States’ willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens—aliens who might give us more advanced technology if only we were less belligerent.

“There’s been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb. and they’re very concerned about that, and about the fact that we might use it again,” added Hellyer, who said that a cold-war era commission determined that at least four alien species had come to Earth. “The whole cosmos is a unity, and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos, they’ve very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again. This would be bad for us and bad for them too.”

Scientists are at fault for dismissing the evidence of “authenticated” alien contacts, added the longest-serving member of Queen Elizabeth Canada Privy Council. “This information is top secret in the way that government isn’t talking about it, but if you talk to the whistleblowers … there’s a lot of information and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to find it”

You might remember the crop circle that suddenly appeared 11 miles southeast of Salinas, California on or about December 28, 2013. As usual, every UFOlogist and woomaster went nuts speculating on the deeper meaning of this symbol – especially as it might pertain to the new year and some kind of cataclysmic event or some kind of awakening. (Woomeisters always predict doom and gloom or some kind of awakening. It’s in their handbook.)

According to one “expert”, the Salinas Crop Circle:

«… contains three coded messages according to renowned crop circle researcher, Dr Horace Drew. According to Dr Drew, a retired molecular biologist who worked at Caltech and Australia’s CSIRO, one of the coded messages was to be vigilant about an upcoming astronomical event. The next message referred to a date in the near future when an astronomical event is to occur by July 8, 2014. The third and most startling message was that comet ISON was a space transportation system. Taken in their entirety, the three messages appear to be encouraging people to watch the skies for an upcoming astronomical event featuring remnants of ISON that will in fact be an extraterrestrial event of some kind.» (source)

You have to love it when an appeal to authority (a retired molecular biologist who worked at Caltech and Australia’s CSIRO) goes horribly wrong.

Another crop researcher Paul Jacobs, who began investigating the Salinas crop circle:

«No one in the area has made claim to it and the locals had no knowledge of it or its construction. I estimate it would have taken three men working in daylight conditions doing 9-hour shifts for nearly 9 days to complete this pattern. My gut feeling is we have an important event on our hands here.» (source)

Well Fox Mulder, the truth is not out there. The truth is right here, on earth … the crop circle was created by the aliens at Nvidia.

«In case you’re not a gamer and don’t know what Nvidia is, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara and pioneers visual computing — the art and science of computer graphics. The crop circle was drawn in the shape of Nvidia’s 192-core super chip, called Tegra K1, and the artists said it was challenging to create.

I can’t resist this excellent example of the human capacity for ad-hoc reasoning and pattern recognition. The Salinas Crop Circle was discovered in late December, and instantly became famous in the crop circle world. It is an example of a complex design, that begs to be interpreted.

Crop circle believers – those who think the designs that are often found drawn in various crops around the world (curiously following cultural lines) are the product of aliens trying to communicate in their abstruse way with humans, like to find meaning in the crop circles. This becomes an exercise in pattern recognition, as they are often trying to find meaning where none exists.

Here is one example. The author, assuming the crop circle is an alien communication, comes up with an elaborate interpretation. He believes it refers to comet ISON, which recently burned up on its journey around the sun. This itself is a good example of “retrodicting.” I would be more impressed if a crop circle predicted something yet to be discovered.

The author interprets that middle square section with dots as braille and comes up with the number 192. It turns out, this is a correct interpretation (more below). He writes:

Its first inner code shows a brief message in Braille saying “192-192-2-192-1-192-192”. This may be a symbolic reference to the British search engine “192.com” (see http://www.192.com). Its implication might be that “the blind will see, and those who search will find”

He tells us 192 is a mystical number that comes up frequently in crop circles. He also interprets some damage to the crops as a comet, the circles around the outer edge as either planets or at marketing the numbers on a clock, and:

Its third intermediate code involves a series of alphabetic characters in Morse code. They seem to read: “E-T B I-S-O-N S-T-S One interpretation of this cryptic message might be: “E T B(e)” or “extra-terrestrials exist”. Then “I-S-O-N (comet)” is an “S-T-S (space transportation system)” like for the NASA space shuttles.

What is interesting is how compelling it seems to us when we can find patterns, especially complex ones. We tend to react as if the fact that we can find a pattern means that it is real. We inherently lack an intuitive understanding of the power of data mining. In other words – we fail to appreciate the possible number of patterns that we can see when we use open-ended criteria. There are countless possible patterns, and the fact that we hit upon one or more means nothing – except that we are good at finding patterns and connections.

The Reveal

This is one of those uncommon cases where we have a definitive answer in the end, which is what makes it such a powerful example. The crop circle was actually commissioned by NVIDIA as a promotional stunt for their new mobile graphics chip. Here is a video of the making of the crop circle:

True believers might try to deny this evidence by saying it occurred after the fact as a distraction, but that is simply not possible. There would not have been time to fake this video, and to come up with an alternate interpretation of the design that so clearly matches NVIDIA’s new chip.

For example, the 192 in braille is accurate, but the 192 refers to the number of processors in the chip. There is a reason why 192 might crop up frequently in the context of computers – because it is 64 x 3, and 64 is a multiple of 8. Because of how computers are built, you will notice that from kilobytes to terabytes, hard drives, flash drives, RAM, etc. all come in such multiples – 64, 128, 256, 512, etc.

It’s interesting that crop circle believers have come to believe that the gray aliens like to communicate in braille. Apparently, so do human crop circle artists.

Watch the video for the full explanation of the meaning in the crop circle. And then see how clever people can be in coming up with alternate interpretations. I guess this is a post-modern approach to crop circles as a narrative form.

On that point – also pay attention to the words of the crop circle artists interviewed in the NVIDIA video. They say, essentially, that part of their art form is creating the crop circles in the context of mystery. It is a collaboration with the crop circle believers, who provide the “other worldly” context and interpretation of their art.

Another artist also says that complex mathematical designs, the ones that look as if they have really complex relationships, are actually the easiest to lay out and create.

This always reminds me of my personal encounter with a crop circle believer who challenged me by saying, “how can they create perfect circles? That’s impossible.” I then introduced her to the concept of a compass, the crop circle equivalent of which is a stake and a rope.

Simple techniques can create mathematical perfection and complexity. That is sort-of the nature of math and geometry, which is all about relationships. These relationships create countless patterns, and believers can plumb the depths of those patterns to their endless satisfaction.

Step 1: Start with the premise that any tragic incident is a massive, intricate government conspiracy.

Step 2: Denounce any information presented by a mainstream, non-conspiracy source that directly counters the predetermined conspiracy narrative as corrupt and part of the conspiracy.

Step 3: Monitor these same mainstream sources for information that supports the predetermined conspiracy narrative, even if only remotely. Mainstream media reporting mistakes that support your conspiracy (or any conspiracy really) must be treated as rare moments of truth, glimpses inside the Matrix. Any mainstream media reports in favor of the conspiracy should be treated like the word of God. Spam that information everywhere.

Step 4: Imagination is the same thing as undeniable fact. There is nothing wrong with manipulating Youtube videos and using Photoshop to edit information to make it more obvious for the stupid sheeple to understand.

Step 5: Reject the skeptics to the conspiracy theories aggressively. Call them out for being sheep, shills, Cointelpro, paid agents, et cetera. Do not ever doubt yourself, because if you think they are any of these nouns, then it is undeniably true. After all, the conspiracy theory you are trying to wake the world up to is a fact. Only a sheep would think otherwise.

Step 6: Bring up the founding of the Federal Reserve, the Bay of Pigs, The Gulf of Tonkin, and other well known deceptive schemes by the government often (every conversation if need be.) These actions were confessed by government, therefore every other conspiracy theory is true!

Step 7: Cite declassified documents often, as they are invaluable. If the government reports that a secret program was started and ended 60 years ago- DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. The secret programs for sure are still occurring and are now more massive, sinister, and successful than before.

Step 8: Remember that most of witnesses and victims involved in conspiracy event are actors. Medical examiners, emergency responders, the police, reporters, they are almost all in on it. The innocent people caught up in the conspiracy were either killed or have been threatened by the conspirators and are too afraid to come forward (or they possibly never existed to begin with.)

Step 9: Blitz the world with the truth until everyone deletes you on Facebook or you are banned from your favorite web sites. Lay low for a period, regroup at your favorite alternative web sites, get encouragement and reinforcement from the other awakened truth seekers, and start the process all over again with a new conspiracy.

I generally don’t delve into the whole UFO thing because, quite frankly, i consider these videos a complete waste of time. But sometimes, the stupid value just outweighs the eye roll value.

Be sure to listen to the guy filming the object. This is great stuff. Oh … and make sure you don’t have any sharp objects in your hand as you watch this, otherwise this facepalm is going to be very painful.

Filmed this from my deck at 1:30 pm on Dec 10, 2013. I spotted the object high above the telephone wires. Once zoomed in I could see it was changing shape rapidly while moving thru the sky. It seemed to construct then deconstruct itself repeatedly in routine. At 0:48 and 1:36 the object changes shape very clearly. I filmed this with a telephoto lens and extender reaching up to 800mm. Slow motion and digital zoom applied.

And yet, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl points out, millions of Americans hold these beliefs. In a Zogby poll taken six years ago, only 64 percent of U.S. adults agreed that the attacks “caught US intelligence and military forces off guard.” More than 30 percent chose a different conclusion: that “certain elements in the US government knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives,” or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”

How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of skepticism, promote so many absurdities?

The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.

Conspiracy chatter was once dismissed as mental illness. But the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history. As you’d expect, distrust turns out to be an important factor. But it’s not the kind of distrust that cultivates critical thinking.

If you’re someone that makes a hobby of investigating conspiracy theories, you will eventually be lead to one place: Youtube.

Youtube seems to the gathering center conspiracy theorists on the internet due to the huge amount a conspiracy theory videos on that website (and I mean huge).

Now there are a lot of things that I have noticed about conspiracy theorists on Youtube that I could talk about, but I have narrowed it down to five different things.

So here are five things that I’ve noticed about conspiracy theorists on Youtube:

5. They can come up with some pretty bizarre conspiracy theories.

If you want to find a really bizarre conspiracy theory, then there is no better place to look than Youtube, because the conspiracy theorists on that website can come up with some very bizarre conspiracy theories. In fact some of the weirdest conspiracy theories that I have ever heard of are from videos on Youtube.

These conspiracy theories on Youtube can get so strange, and combined with a person’s own behavior either in a video, or in the comments section, that it makes one wonder if that person is either a poe, or a fraud that is looking for attention (or to scam people), or severely mentally ill. In fact some conspiracy theorist on Youtube have been proven to be either mentally ill or frauds.

Some of these videos are so bizarre that I’ve had to stop watching them at times because I felt that it was driving me crazy (mostly rage) and making me want to destroy my computer in frustration over not only how some one could come up with some thing that crazy and stupid, but also in frustration over why Youtube would allow such a video to stay on the website.

If such videos make me nearly go crazy then I can’t imagine what they do to people who take these videos seriously.

4. Their videos can be extremely long.

Sometimes a conspiracy theorist’s video on Youtube can be short, sometimes they can be half an hour long, and sometimes they can go on for hours and hours.

Some of the longest videos that I have ever seen on Youtube have been from conspiracy theorists, and I’m not talking about an hour or two long. Some of these videos can be three to four to six hours long. In fact I think the longest one I have ever seen (I didn’t actually watch it, I just noted the time) was forty hours long!

The only way someone could watch such videos is if they were unemployed and/or had no life what so ever. They would have to spend all of their time infront of a computer watching these poorly made and researched Youtube videos which would become essentially their only source of information about the world…

Besides just making abnormally long videos, conspiracy theorists on Youtube also tend to do this:

3. They create videos of an event quickly after an event happens.

Thanks mostly due to cheap (many times free), widely available, and easy to use video capturing and editing software, conspiracy theorist can now create videos at astonishingly amazing speeds after some event happens, sometimes even within hours of an event happening.

For decades now we have been trying communicate with other intelligent life else where in the universe, or at the very least find proof that they are other intelligent life forms out there in the universe.

Despite all of our efforts through SETI and other programs like SETI, we still haven’t found any proof that there are other intelligent life forms out there.

So why is it that despite all of our efforts to find and communicate with other intelligent life forms in the universe we still haven’t done so?

Well, there are a few reasons why we haven’t yet:

They don’t exist.

As difficult (and statistically improbable) as it may seem to be, there is a very real (yet microscopic) possibly that the reason why aliens haven’t talked to us yet is because their is no other life in the universe, or at the very least that there are no other worlds besides this one that has life on them that have evolved into intelligent life forms.

They’re not advanced enough to communicate with us or get here.

One of the reasons why aliens may have never communicated with us or have come to our planet is because they are not technologically advanced enough to either travel to the stars, or create a communication system that would allow them to send out signals into interstellar space. This isn’t very surprising since we are barely able to do this ourselves (By the way, we are able to travel to the stars, and we do have a technology that would allow us to do so if we were to give it the funding. It’s called nuclear pulse propulsion).

Despite the fact that the universe is around 13.8 billion years old, there is no reason to believe that there are any other civilizations out there that are just as advanced, if not more advanced than we are, and that we may be the most advanced civilization in the universe. But, considering how old the universe is, there is also no reason to believe that there are no civilizations out there that are far more advanced than we are as well, and can easily get from one star to another.

They are able to communicate with us and even get here, they are just very far away.

Maybe they are able to travel between the stars, and even able to send out radio signals, but they just haven’t gotten here because of one simple reason: distance.

The universe is a very vast place, and the fact is that unless you have a way to travel and/or communicate faster than the speed of light, it can take years, even centuries, for a radio signal or a space ship to get from one star system to another, so it is entirely possible that the reason why we have never found an alien radio signal, or that an alien space ship has never come here, is because it just hasn’t reached us yet.

They are unaware of our existence.

One of the reasons why aliens have never communicated with us is the same reason why we haven’t communicated with them: they don’t know we are here.

It is entirely possible that an intelligent alien species has seen and heard our radio signals, and either can not figure out where it came from, or they can’t understand it and dismiss it as natural phenomenon (which we could be doing with radio signals from space right now that we believe are natural radio signals given off by stars, but are really alien radio signals).

Plus, who is to say that they are even looking for other intelligent life out there like we are? For all that we know aliens might not even believe that it is possible for intelligent life to exist on other worlds, and thus aren’t even trying to find other intelligent life forms out there in the universe.

Millions of people on this planet claim to have been abducted by aliens. About two hundred of them (alleged abductees, that is) will converge on Portland this weekend, for the second annual Experiencers Speak conference, organized by and for people who say they’ve been kidnapped by — or had close encounters with — extraterrestrials.

Among those who plan to attend the two-day symposium are Travis Walton, the logger whose UFO experience was portrayed in the 1993 film Fire in the Sky; Jim Weiner, one of four young men who saw a UFO and “lost time” (presumably due to abduction) during a 1976 camping trip in Allagash, Maine; and Kathleen Marden, director of abduction research for the Mutual UFO Network, a national organization dedicated to researching UFO sightings. Marden is also the niece of Betty and Barney Hill, the New Hampshire couple who claimed to have been seized by aliens in September 1961 near Franconia Notch. Many more will come to share their own stories, and be validated by others; last year’s Experiencers Speak event in Gorham attracted about 150 attendees.

“People really need to talk about it and realize that they’re not alone,” says Audrey Hewins of Mechanic Falls, the lead organizer of the conference and founder of Starborn Support, a group that exists to help those who say they’ve met ETs. “We like to get them to a point where they accept who they are and are able to function in society.”

Hewins, 40, describes herself as a “lifelong abductee,” who, along with her identical twin sister, has “been taken [repeatedly] since early childhood.” After years of trying to repress the memories (she calls it “stuffing”) she and her sister reached out to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), and a representative from that organization put both sisters under hypnosis (separately), helping them to access often-traumatizing memories of visits from “beings” with big, motionless, almond-shaped eyes and bald heads. Over time, through hypnosis, Hewins began to recall experiences of being paralyzed, lifted, and brought onto a spacecraft — all at extraterrestrial hands.

Although Hewins likens “Post-Abduction Syndrome” (PAS) to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), her interactions with the otherworldly beings weren’t always hostile; in fact, it was one of them that suggested she launch Starborn Support in 2006. Today, there are chapters in 10 states along the east coast, along with a Starborn streaming radio program.

“This isn’t something you can tell your family members without having them question you,” says Kathleen Marden, of MUFON, who co-coordinates a peer-facilitated support group for experiencers in Florida. “Some people receive very negative feedback” from loved ones such as ridicule or ostracization (not to mention lay diagnosis of “totally insane”).

Nearly everyone who’s looked up at the night sky has asked him or herself at least some form of the very same question: Are we really, truly alone in the universe? The only thing that’s certain is that we definitely don’t want to be. Maybe that explains why we keep seeing UFOs in the sky… and why they’re always one of three types.

The idea that humankind is pretty much the end all be all as far as intelligent life goes is a pretty depressing thought. It’s only natural, then, that we’d grasp on to pretty much anything as a sign of alien contact—seriously, anything. History is rife with reports of UFO sightings, but if you take a second to stop and think, nearly all of them come with perfectly reasonable explanations—and not one of them extraterrestrial.

Consider this: It would take one of our space ships 60,000 years simply to reach the edge of our galaxy alone. Now, that doesn’t bode well for an extraterrestrial playdate. But this hasn’t deterred the hoards of people willing to swear until their dying day that they have seen, interacted with, touched, and/or been probed (anally or otherwise) by creatures of a world beyond our own. And sure, the thought that we’re not alone is an exciting if not slightly unsettling one, but these little claims and subsequent “proofs” of alien life on Earth almost always fall into one of three categories: military exercises gone wrong, acts of nature, and of course, man-made hoaxes.

• Military

Ever notice how UFO sightings tend to conveniently happen on or around military bases? Yeah, that’s not a coincidence. Be it weather balloon, aerial spy cam, or rogue aircraft, people are more than happy to assume that the mystery circling overhead is alien—rather than military-made—especially during times of national paranoia.

The Battle of Los Angeles

Times of paranoia like, say, WWII, for instance. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the country’s sense of security was shattered. So three months later, when a weather balloon went casually wafting over Los Angeles in 1942, hysteria naturally followed suit. What’s a terrified city to do? Why, conduct a massive military airstrike against the interloper, of course—resulting in this iconic photograph of what was later dubbed The Battle of Los Angeles.

Initially the shadow in the sky was thought to be another attack coming over from Japan, but at a press conference shortly after the incident, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox quickly put that rumor to rest, calling it a “false alarm.” Which then left media personnel free to publish all sorts of “reports” of extraterrestrial coverup. And remember—after WWII, people were shaken. They were ready to believe anything.

The Battle of Los Angeles acclimated civilians to the notion that alien sightings were not only plausible but likely. It allowed for a more comfortable way to explain away their fears, and the instances only picked up speed.

One of the most notorious alleged UFO sightings (and the inspiration for a criminally underrated television show), Roswell, all started in July of 1947 when local ranch foreman William Brazel stumbled upon a giant ditch hundreds of feet long and filled with debris—namely rubber strips, tin foil, paper, scotch tape, and toughened sticks.

Since the bizarre mess was on the property where he worked, Brazel promptly reported it to the authorities, and the account eventually made its way over to the Roswell Army Airfield base. The base’s commander denounced the mess to be nothing more than a weather balloon gone wrong, encouraging everyone to forget about the mini-dump and go about their business. So of course, conspiracy theorists decided it was the perfect time for a good, ol’ fashioned UFO rabble-rousing.

Stanton Friedman, a physicist and amateur ufologist (it’s a word), was one of those noble crusaders for the alien origins explanation—it’s just that he decided to wait a good 30 years before weighing in because, well, no one really knows why. After interviewing Major Jesse Marcel—one of the site’s original inspectors—in 1978, Friedman got what he was looking for. Marcel claimed that the entire event was a military coverup of an alien spaceship. Bingo!

Glenn Dennis, a mortician, also piped in (another 11 years after that) and claimed that dead bodies had been removed from the site and taken to an airbase. But apparently, these people weren’t totally insane (or at the very least, totally wrong).

Because there was so much controversy over what actually happened, two separate official government investigations took place—one in 1994 and the other in 1995. The first confirmed that the cause had indeed been a weather balloon; the military was testing them in a classified program that used sensitive lights to try to detect Russian nuclear tests. The second cleared up that whole “dead bodies” issue; the test had used dummies during parachute testing, dummies which then had to be removed.

After Roswell, interest in potential alien spacecrafts skyrocketed, with almost 800 sightings occurring in the weeks that directly followed. As with the Battle of Los Angeles, the international climate probably played a role; this was mid-Cold War, when Americans were well-primed for a little extra paranoia and perpetual fear. While photographs of UFOs are now are relatively rare and met with considerable skepticism, back then, the claims were accepted in droves. Each UFO sighting was merely another log tossed on top of an already hefty pile of anxiety-inducing fodder.

In August and September of 1951, the small town of Lubbock, Texas enjoyed its own brief stint in the UFO spotlight. The Texas Technical College professors spotted a group of 20-30 some-odd lights floating overhead the night of August 25. The next week, student Carl Hart noticed a similar phenomenon in the sky and snapped photos, which the local newspaper then published and eventually sent nationwide.

Lieutenant Edward Ruppelt from the Air Force’s Project Blue Book (the government agency set up for the express purpose of UFO investigations) analyzed the images and ultimately declared them not to be a hoax—but he didn’t believe them to be of alien origin, either. Rather Ruppelt believed that the vision had been nothing more than streetlights being reflected off the underbellies of a flock of plovers. Witnesses in the area supported this explanation, agreeing that they had in fact seen large flocks of migratory birds and had even her some squawking.

Still, others maintained that the lieutenant was simply attempting to cover up the training exercises of the Air Port’s new flying wing. Whichever the correct explanation might be, however, certainly doesn’t include aliens.

• Acts of Nature

Pink UFO: A stack of altocumulus lenticularis clouds hovers over the Alpujarra Mountains in southern Spain, stained by the rays of the setting sunPicture: IAN DENNIS

These little alien scares down’t necessarily have to come from the hand of man, though. Our world is fully capable of creating its own absolutely beautiful, stunning phenomenons that can pretty easily terrify any witnesses who don’t understand what’s going on in the sky above them. Generally, as science advances, we have fewer and fewer instances of people reporting suspicious, potentially otherworldly activity in the wake of a natural occurrence. Still, it’s curious how quick we are to jump to the conclusion that a phenomenal vision came from some alien being when, in fact, it just came from our very own phenomenal world.

Portugal’s Miracle of the Sun

In 1917, 30,000 people in Fatima, Portugal supposedly witnessed the “Miracle of the Sun,” an event that was supposed to predict the appearance of the Virgin Mary. Crowds gathered to find themselves staring at a cloudy sky for hours. But when the clouds finally did part and the sun came bearing down, everybody simultaneously experienced radiating, multicolored lights that came spiraling downwards. And cue collective panic… now.

Understandably, though, and to this clearly devoutly religious population, the bright, shiny lights could very well have seemed like a sign of the End Times. Nearly 100 years later, we’re aware of the fact that staring at the sun for such a long of a period of time has the potential to directly induce mass hysteria and hallucinations. But hey, they were looking for a little excitement; at least they got what they came for. The severe retina damage was just a bonus.

UFO. It’s a term and phenomenon that’s been around with the public for decades now and has basically the main name used when someone claims they have seen an alien spaceship.

While there are many things that I have noticed about UFOs, I’ve narrowed it down to five things.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about UFOs:

5. People use that term in contrast what it really means.

I’m sure that most people know that “UFO” means Unidentified Flying Object, but most of the time now when someone uses the term UFO they don’t actually use it to describe an object in the air that they can not identify at the moment, instead it now means to most people that when a person says that they are seeing a UFO that they mean to say that they are seeing what they believe is an alien spaceship.

Even if it turns out a UFO is really a alien spacecraft, then the term UFO can not be applied anymore because the Unidentified Flying Object has in fact been identified.

4. People take horrible pictures and videos of them.

Most photos and videos of UFOs tend to be pretty bad. Many of them are blurry and don’t really give much details. Some of them just look like balls of light or some other featureless object in the sky that could really be just something simple like a balloon (and yes, balloons do get misidentified as UFOs).

While there are some good photos and videos of UFOs out there that are pretty detailed, there’s just one little problem with most of them…

3. The good ones are faked.

There are good, detailed photos and videos of UFOs out there that can be easily found on the internet. The one problem that all these very highly detailed photos and videos have is that they are always found out to be fakes.

UFO photos and videos have been being faked for decades now, be it either using built from scratch models used from the 1950’s on up til today, to digitally altered photos and videos that have been being made since the 1990’s.

People will probably continue to make these fake UFO photos and videos because they tend to get people attention, while skeptics will continue to debunk them.

Stories of alien abductions are found across the world. Yet according to mainstream science, there’s no evidence to prove these outlandish claims. Tune in to learn more about the controversy surrounding stories of alien abductions.

It’s happened to all of us. Some friend we had in elementary school or from an old job is all of a sudden making super weird comments on Facebook, or you’re in a bar and some random [person] is trying to talk to you about fluoride for some reason. It’s not always immediately clear. Like, I realized one day that people saying crazy things were always following it up with “Do your own research!” and then finally discovered that it was sort of a “buzzphrase” for conspiracy theorists.

So, I thought I’d compile a list of the ways to know that someone in your life is starting to head down to tin foil hat alley.

1. Says insane things (probably about chemtrails), and if you dispute, insists that you “Do your own research!”

“I’m a University of YouTube graduate!”

This is one of the earliest signs of this type of crazy- and it’s also a major Glenn Beck-ism. I don’t know about you, but when I state a fact, I’m usually able to explain that fact. Especially if it’s something that may be controversial.

For instance, I do not so much believe that Joan Crawford beat her children. This is a thing that most people believe, because of the movie “Mommie Dearest”– however, when asked to explain, I don’t yell “Do your own research!” at people, I explain that all of the other children (save for Christopher) have refuted Christina’s book, as well as Crawford’s actual personal assistant, and Myrna Loy, and pretty much anyone else who was around during that time. I’m not saying I’m 100% definitely correct on this, but I err on the side of “probably not.”

Still, I don’t throw out something weird, get mad at people for not immediately taking me at my word, and then yell at them to do their own research. I mean, if they want to, that’s fine, but I’m usually quite able to support my arguments.

UGH. These people and their fluoride. They love to make up crap about how the government puts fluoride in the water to keep us dumb and rebellion-resistant, like no one has ever seen “Dr. Strangelove” before or something. This is usually what they start with, probably because it sounds slightly more realistic than like, Lizard People.

It is not, however, true. At all. And yes, I’ve “done my research.” But don’t tell that to these people, especially if they are drunk at a bar, because they will, in fact, start screaming at you about it. Fluoride and the “vaccinations cause autism” thing are like the gateway drugs into tin-foil hat land.

3. Rejecting the tyranny of paragraph breaks

I swear to god, this is a thing. Whenever I see a comment that’s just a giant block of text with no breaks in it, I immediately just go “Welp, this one’s gonna be crazy” and I am pretty much always right. I don’t know why this is a thing, it just is.

4. When a person who you already kinda know isn’t too swift starts trying to pretend that they are some kind of intellectual who is totally going to school you on “how things are in the world.”

I hate to say this, but it’s true. It’s always the dumb ones. I feel bad, because like, they’re usually just coming across this stuff for the first time and it is totally blowing their minds. Like, I already know that some people think that the Rothschilds control the world and that there are Mason things on the dollar bill and also THE MOON LANDING WAS FAKED or whatever. I’ve known for years, and I’ve already figured out that it’s all bullshit.

The more you read about history, the more you realize that people are so not getting it together to form a whole “New World Order” anytime soon. While there have been “conspiracy” type things throughout history (MKUltra, Tuskeegee, Project Paperclip, the COINTELPRO that actually existed and not the one people pretend still exists), they have been discovered fairly quickly. Because someone always has a big mouth.

UFOs, and what they are, have been a subject of debate throughout the world for decades now.

For those who are apart of the UFO community, UFOs are usually considered to be extra-terrestrial spacecraft. For skeptics however most UFOs can be easily explained as either being some type of natural weather or astronomical phenomenon, a mis-identification of a man made object, or a hoax.

Beside the most obvious explanations for what UFOs are, there are a few not so obvious (or in some cases, accepted) explanations for what UFOs really are:

8. Extra-dimensional

Probably one of the far most common alternative UFO explanations is that UFOs (and the alleged beings operating them) are actually from other universes, rather than other planets.

This explanation has become so common among UFO believers that many believers actually try to determine if a UFO in a photo or video is of either extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional origin (rather than of natural or man made origin).7. Time travelers

Another explanation for the origin of UFOs is that they are from Earth, just far, far into the future. Just how far exactly is often debated amongst the UFO believers who believe this theory.

Some people believe that they’re from a few hundred years into the future. Some people believe that they’re from several millions of years into the future. Some people even believe that they’re just from a few decades into the future.

6. Angels and Demons

Probably one of the more popular explanations amongst devout and fundamentalist Christians (especially those who don’t believe in even the possibility of extra-terrestrial life existing elsewhere in the universe) is that UFOs are either angels sent by God, or (more commonly) demons sent by Satan.

While this explanation is far more accepted with devout and fundamentalist Christians (at least those who actually believe in UFOs to begin with) most UFO believers (and skeptics for that matter) do not.

5. Secret and experimental military aircraft

One of the more common explanations for UFOs amongst both skeptics and UFO believers is that many UFOs are actually secret and experimental military aircraft.

The reason why this is accepted among skeptics as well as UFO believers is because several different kinds military aircraft, back when they were still secret and/or experimental, were thought to be UFOs (i.e. F-117, B-2) and that sometimes the government even used the UFO phenomenon as a cover to help keep certain aircraft secret for years (like with the SR-71).

While skeptics and UFO believers do accept that some UFOs are most likely secret and experimental aircraft, many UFO believers also believe that these aircraft are far more technologically advance than what anyone believes is currently possible, and that the technology being used in them is of extra-terrestrial origin.

There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness.

What are the psychological forces at play in conspiracy thinking?

Basically what’s happening in any conspiracy theory is that people have a need or a motivation to believe in this theory, and it’s psychologically different from evidence-based thinking. A conspiracy theory is immune to evidence, and that can pretty well serve as the definition of one. If you reject evidence, or reinterpret the evidence to be confirmation of your theory, or you ignore mountains of evidence to focus on just one thing, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist. We call that a self-sealing nature of reasoning.

Another common trait is the need to constantly expand the conspiracy as new evidence comes to light. For instance, with the so-called Climategate scandal, there were something like nine different investigations, all of which have exonerated the scientists involved. But the response from the people who held this notion was to say that all of those investigations were a whitewash. So it started with the scientists being corrupt and now not only is it them, but it’s also all the major scientific organizations of the world that investigated them and the governments of the U.S. and the U.K., etc., etc. And that’s typical — instead of accepting the evidence, you actually turn it around and say that it’s actually evidence to support the conspiracy because it just means it’s even broader than it was originally thought to be.

Are there certain types of people who are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories than others? Does it match any kind of political lines?

I don’t think there is a systematic association between political views and the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories. There are some studies that suggest people on the political left are inclined to it, and there are some that suggest people on the right are. But it’s always a weak association.

For hundreds—if not thousands—of years, people have had a fascination with trying to make contact with extra terrestrials. So far, all the messages we’ve sent into the universe have gone unanswered—and judging by the confusing, random, and downright weird transmissions you’ll find in this list, it might be a good thing if our communications continue to go unnoticed. If any intelligent life does intercept these varied signals, it’s difficult to know what kind of impression they’ll have of humanity—but it’s a fair bet they’ll think we’re pretty strange.

10 • Crop Triangles and Burning Canals

While people often associate crop circles with communication from aliens, some of the earliest forms of crop circles were actually made by people trying to contact extraterrestrials. For instance, in the 1820s, German mathematician Carl Friedrich concluded that the best way to converse with aliens would be to make a message they could see from above. Naturally, he ventured into the Siberian forest and systematically cut down trees to make a massive triangular shape, and inside the triangle he planted wheat. He also transmitted multiple “sky telegraphs,” which involved using a heliotrope (his own invention) to reflect sunlight towards other planets.

Two decades later, astronomer Joseph Von Littrow, who thought the moon was inhabited, came up with the idea of digging huge symbol-shaped trenches in the Sahara Desert, filling them with oil, and lighting them on fire at night. He hoped that the bright flames would alert space beings of our presence on Earth. Both Littrow and Friedrich assumed that geometric shapes were the ideal way to connect with an alien, since it’s believed that mathematical principles are consistent throughout the universe.

9 • Concentrated Light

After seeing pinpoints of light on Mars and Venus (probably meteorological phenomena), French inventor Charles Cros came to believe he had witnessed lights from distant, other worldly cities. So in 1869, he took Carl Friedrich’s ideas a step further by using parabolic mirrors to direct light from electric lamps towards other planets. Using something like Morse code, Cros flashed his lights on and off in an intentional pattern which he hoped would be recognized by another intelligent being.

He was doubtful that the small mirrors would be effective, but said that if they did happen to work, “It will be a moment of joy and pride. The eternal isolation of the spheres is vanquished.”

Not unexpectedly, Cros didn’t hear back from the Martians. Despite this setback, he repeatedly petitioned the French government to build a massive mirror capable of burning giant shapes into the deserts of Mars and Venus. For more than one reason (mainly because it was impossible, and also because starting a fire on another planet probably isn’t the best way to say “hello”), the French government didn’t honor Cros’ request, and he was never able to fulfill his dream of alien contact.

In the early 1970s, NASAlaunched two space probes, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, with the mission of exploring the large gas planets, the asteroid belt, and the outer reaches of the solar system. In addition to outfitting the spacecrafts with an array of scientific instruments, the astronauts also thought it would be a good idea to tack on a message to extraterrestrials—because after all, you never know.

Famed astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the Pioneer Plaque. The plaque is a six inch by nine inch gold anodized tablet, depicting diagrams of the universe (just in case the aliens need a map), a schematic of hydrogen (the most plentiful element in the universe), as well as pictures of a couple of naked people—once again, why not? Identical copies of the plaque were bolted to the frames of each spacecraft.

NASA lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003 and then Pioneer 11 in 2005, and while they both provided loads of insight about our solar system, we’ve yet to answer the big question: can aliens understand our bizarre drawings? Some argue that the symbols are too abstract for an alien intelligence to comprehend, while others worry that we’re giving potentially dangerous life forms a direct map to our planet. Indeed, some also fear that the nude images make humans seem a little pervy. And of course, all of the above groups are outnumbered by those who believe that the whole business is a big waste of time and taxpayer money. Until a little green guy shows up, plaque in hand, thanking us for the directions—we’ll never know.

Around the same time as the Pioneer launches, astronomers were also toying with the idea of using focused, amplified radio waves to connect with unearthly beings. They knew that radio waves were less affected by cosmic dust than light, and they also figured out how to direct radio waves at targeted points many light years into space. For these reasons, it seemed that radio was the best way to reach out into the depths of the universe and deliver a message.

Once again, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan teamed up to concoct another human-to-alien communication. This time their message consisted of seven parts, including an image of a human, the structure of DNA, atomic numbers of common elements, and the numbers one to ten. They transmitted the communication in binary digits, with all the zeroes and ones represented by two different frequencies. Incidentally, the images ended up looking like something out of an Atari game, so if the aliens ever decode the signal they may simply think we’re big fans of 80s video games, and decide to avoid us.

In 1974, astronomers used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to direct the message towards star cluster M13, which is home to an abundance of stars and therefore has a better chance of containing intelligent life. The only downside to M13’s location is that it’s 21,000 light years away—so if an alien ever does send a radio reply, it will take us more than forty thousand years to get it.

Whether you are a believer or not, it is a fact that Unidentified Objects or Anomalous Aerial Phenomena, are seen and have been seen since ancient times in the earth’s atmosphere. When it comes to sightings of UFO’s, pilots and other aviation professionals are partial to using less stigma-inducing words like “balloon, unknown traffic, unidentified object, traffic, or unknown aircraft” when they are interviewed after having seen something odd during a flight. The most mysterious and thought provoking UFO sightings, are those not only witnessed by several people, but also confirmed by radar. These accounts can never fully be explained and they continue to be real for all the witnesses involved.

10 • 1952 Washington Sightings – USA

From 12 to 29 July 1952, a series of sightings took place in Washington. One of the most publicized events took place on the 19th. On that evening, an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport detected seven unidentified objects on his radar screen. His superior immediately verified that the instrumentation wasn’t faulty. Moments later a controller at another facility also confirmed the objects, but he also saw “a bright orange light”, while yet another controller confirmed an orange disc hovering above the airport. At that point the radarscope lit up with even more objects and the controllers phoned Andrews Air Force Base. Tracked by the air force as well as the other radar centers fighter jets was scrambled. Some fighters reported that they saw “white glows” or lights (one even engaged them) while others reported nothing unusual. The Air Force’s “false radar readings caused by a temperature inversion” excuse failed to impress as the objects were also seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses and as such, speculation continues to this day.

9 • Campeche Sighting – Mexico 2004

In March 2004, the crew of a military surveillance plane busy with a routine anti-drug trafficking surveillance flight caught sight of three unidentified objects on their radar. As they couldn’t see anything with the naked eye in the area where the objects were supposed to be, they turned on their infra-red camera to track them. For the next 30 minutes, they recorded 11 unidentified objects moving through the sky at a very high pace. One of the objects also seemed to divide or separate into two different objects. After chasing them, there were a few tense moments when the radar confirmed the objects had surrounded them. In a completely uncharacteristic move, the Mexican government released all the details of the event and they provided the crew, footage and the Head of the Mexican Air Force for examination and questioning by the world’s media.

In 1952, Flight Sergeant Roland Hughes was returning to his base from a training mission when a “gleaming silver, metallic disc” started following him. The Sergeant later described the disc to be shiny, highly reflective and about the size of a Lancaster bomber. The disc descended towards him and even traveled alongside him before it sped off at an incredible speed. The object was caught by the RAF radars; the controllers confirmed that the object traveled at speeds impossible for any of the aircraft of the time. Six days later, Hughes was sent to West Germany to give his official account of what happened to senior RAF officers and the aviation Minister. The minister was so convinced, that he briefed civil servants on the matter. After the sighting, Hughes was nicknamed “Saucer Sam” and his colleagues decorated his jet with a painted flying saucer. According to his family, Hughes never spoke about the incident unless he was asked to do so.

7 • The Washington, D.C. Jet Chase – 2002

In an incident that is awash with conspiracy theories; NORAD and the Air National Guard picked up an unknown object that entered Washington’s restricted flying zone on 26 July 2002. As the object’s track caused concern, F-16’s were scrambled to intercept the object but the pilots claimed that they saw nothing when they arrived on the scene—the object also disappeared from radar. At the same time in Maryland several witnesses saw a fast-moving bright blue light in the sky; the witnesses also said they saw jets pursuing it at high speed. According to NORAD, that was all that transpired and they view the matter as closed. But, according to the witnesses more than 2 jets were in the air which indicated that the scramble was unique; one dipped its wings on approach as if to communicate with the unknown object and they also claim that the jets trailed the unknown object but the object flew too fast for the jets to keep up. The event featured on FOX news as well as the Washington Post.

On the evening of May 25, 1995 America West Flight 564 was flying at an altitude of about 39,000 ft close to Bovina, Texas. While observing lightning outside the plane, the attendant noticed a peculiar set of flickering lights a little bit below the 757. The First Officer was alerted to the phenomena, he immediately saw the lights which he described as eight bright blue strobes. As the rest of the flight crew watched the flashing lights, they could discern the object as being cigar-shaped. The pilots estimated it to be between 300 and 400 ft long. The object could not be seen on the FAA’s radar. The following day the controllers checked with NORAD and discovered that they tracked an unknown object the previous evening that appeared to be stationary, but would accelerate and stop time and time again at high speeds. These quick sprints were estimated between 1,000 and 1,400 mph. The object was also seen by a US Air Force pilot manning an EF 111A. To date, the incident remains unsolved.

Stories say it’s up there in the blackness right now, just outside the Earth’s glow. It tumbles slowly and deliberately through the darkness, sweeping smoothly along its unrelenting orbit. The Earth spins below, largely unaware of its unauthorized parasitic visitor. It is the Black Knight satellite, a mysterious object cirling the Earth, of unknown (and possibly alien) origin — the story says it’s up there right now, and has been for 13,000 years.

Like so many stories of weird phenomena, the Black Knight satellite legend starts with Nicola Tesla. It’s said that he picked up a repeating radio signal in 1899, that he believed was coming from space, and said so publicly at a conference. In the 1920s, amateur HAM radio operators were able to receive this same signal. Next, scientists in Oslo, Norway experimenting with short wave transmissions into space in 1928, began picking up Long Delay Echoes (LDEs), a not fully understood phenomenon in which they received echoes several seconds after transmission. The apparent explanation finally came in 1954 when newspapers (including the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the San Francisco Examiner) reported an announcement from the US Air Force that two satellites were found to be orbiting the Earth, at a time when no nation yet had the ability to launch them. It appeared that Black Knight had been detected by multiple lines of evidence, and was confirmed by the US Air Force.

By 1960, both the United States and the Soviet Union had hardware in orbit. But on February 11, 1960, newspapers everywhere reported some alarming news: that somebody else also had something in orbit. A radar screen, designed by the US Navy to detect enemy spy satellites, had picked something up. It was described as a dark, tumbling object. It wasn’t ours, and it wasn’t the Soviets’ either.

The next day, newspapers reported a bit more information. The mysterious object was orbiting at about 79 degrees off from the equator, not the 90 degrees of a proper polar orbit. Its orbit was also highly eccentric, with an apogee of 1,728 km but a perigee of only 216 km. The object made a complete orbit every 104.5 minutes.

At the time, the Navy was tracking one known casing from an old Discoverer launch, a half shell a bit less than 6 meters long. Discoverer VIII had launched on November 20, 1959, a stepping stone toward launching a man into space and then recovering him in a parachuting capsule. The launch went as planned, but its mission to eject its 136 kg capsule didn’t go so well. The capsule’s casings came off as planned, but the capsule itself went astray into an orbit somewhat similar to that of the mystery object, and was eventually declared lost. The Navy tracked one of the casings, which was then orbiting every 103 minutes at 80 degrees, with an apogee of 950 km and a perigee of 187 km. Black Knight’s object was similar, but not exactly the same.

And then, in 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a greenish UFO during his 15th orbit on board Mercury 9. It was witnessed on the radar screens by approximately 100 people at NASA’s Muchea Tracking Station near Perth, Australia. An official explanation given later was that Cooper’s electronics malfunctioned, and he breathed in too much CO2 which gave him hallucinations. Black Knight’s reality seemed to be undeniable.

The CIA offers an electronic search engine that lets you mine about 11 million agency documents that have been declassified over the years. It’s called CREST, short for CIA Records Search Tool. But this represents only a portion the CIA’s declassified materials, and if you want unfettered access to the search engine, you’ll have to physically visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, historians and researchers have urged the CIA to provide them with their own copy of the CREST electronic database, so that they can seek greater insight into U.S. history and even build up additional checks and balances against the government’s approach to official secrecy. But the agency won’t do it. “Basically, the CIA is saying that the database of declassified documents is itself classified,” explains Steve Aftergood, a senior research analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, who oversees the federation’s government secrecy project.

It’s an irony that represents a much larger problem in the world of declassified government documents. According to Aftergood — a researcher some have called the “the Yoda of Official Secrecy” — most government agencies haven’t even gone as far as the CIA in providing online access to declassified documents, and as it stands, there’s no good way of electronically searching declassified documents from across disparate agencies.

“The state of the declassified archives is really stuck in the middle of the 20th Century,” says Aftergood. He calls it a “fairly dismal picture,” but he also says there’s an enormous opportunity to improve the way we research declassified materials — and improve it very quickly — through the use of modern technology.

That’s the aim of a new project launched by a team of historians, mathematicians, and computer scientists at Columbia University in New York City. Led by Matthew Connelly — a Columbia professor trained in diplomatic history — the project is known as The Declassification Engine, and it seeks to provide a single online database for declassified documents from across the federal government, including the CIA, the State Department, and potentially any other agency.

The project is still in the early stages, but the team has already assembled a database of documents that stretches back to the 1940s, and it has begun building new tools for analyzing these materials. In aggregating all documents into a single database, the researchers hope to not only provide quicker access to declassified materials, but to glean far more information from these documents than we otherwise could.

Alex Jones, the boisterous voice of a cult of conspiracy that questions, quite literally, everything from the legitimacy of terrorist attacks to the use of artificial sweeteners like aspartame, might have started getting just a tad too paranoid for the community that he’s had such a huge part in building.

The latest, and one of the most public, efforts to push back against Jones’ particular brand of government distrust comes from Films for Action, a popular hub for the promotion of alternative, independent films and media.

After being questioned numerous times at their failure to include any Infowars or Prison Planet documentaries, Films for Action took the opportunity to release a statement about why their decision to steer away from Alex Jones was a conscious decision from the get-go.

Unfortunately, we feel it would be irresponsible to promote Alex Jones, his websites, or any of his films. His films were always overly sensational and hyperbolic, but over the years the assertions he makes in his films and on his radio show have gotten increasingly outlandish and unsubstantiated. There are nuggets of truth and important perspectives hidden in the films, but they are buried under so many wild claims, tabloid style rhetoric, fear-mongering, and misleading conclusions that sifting the valid points from the misinformation would take more time than most folks have the patience for. See this, this, this,this, and this, for a handful of examples.

Most skeptical people will have written off his ideas (and anything associated with it, including, likely, this site) long before the film finishes.

We believe the goal of the alternative media is to eventually become the mainstream media – a media for and by the people, rather than a media for and by corporate interests. The alternative media that we imagine is one that has the potential to be welcomed into the homes of virtually everyone. We want to demonstrate the best of what the alternative media is and could be.

This means presenting information in a credible fashion, and not promoting misinformation or misleading meta-narratives about our world. It means following diligently the ethical principles and standards of the best journalists.

Infowars appeals to a certain niche conspiracy audience, but beyond this niche, it is not of much use for reaching people ‘beyond the choir’ – in fact the presentation and substance of Infowars is quite alienating and off-putting to most people. Right now on Infowars minded sites and Facebook pages, they are focusing their attention on occult messages being placed in the movies The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games that allude to the latest two gun massacres being pre-planned events staged by the New World Order. Stuff like this has become conspiracy porn for a growing audience, which we find quite troubling, as focusing on these types of dead ends keep people distracted from doing anything that could effectively end the systems of power these websites claim to decry.

We must regretfully conclude that Alex Jones does more harm to the movement than good.

That last line seems to pretty well sum up a growing opinion for conspiracy theorists, an opinion that when it comes to spreading the “truth” – their truth, however suppressed, uncomfortable, or bizarre that “truth” may be, Alex Jones is no longer the right man for the job.

In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and the manhunt came to a close, the speculation didn’t cease. It took a new form. A sampling: Maybe the brothers Tsarnaev were just patsies, fall guys set up to take the heat for a mysterious Saudi with high-level connections; or maybe they were innocent, but instead of the Saudis, the actual bomber had acted on behalf of a rogue branch of our own government; or what if the Tsarnaevs were behind the attacks, but were secretly working for a larger organization?

Crazy as these theories are, those propagating them are not — they’re quite normal, in fact. But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. And it’s very likely that this isn’t the only news story that makes you feel as if shadowy forces are behind major world events.

“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.

As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1965 book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories, especially those involving meddlesome foreigners, are a favorite pastime in this nation. Americans have always had the sneaking suspicion that somebody was out to get us — be it Freemasons, Catholics or communists. But in recent years, it seems as if every tragedy comes with a round of yarn-spinning, as the Web fills with stories about “false flag” attacks and “crisis actors” — not mere theorizing but arguments for the existence of a completely alternate version of reality.

Since Hofstadter’s book was published, our access to information has vastly improved, which you would think would have helped minimize such wild speculation. But according to recent scientific research on the matter, it most likely only serves to make theories more convincing to the public. What’s even more surprising is that this sort of theorizing isn’t limited to those on the margins. Perfectly sane minds possess an incredible capacity for developing narratives, and even some of the wildest conspiracy theories can be grounded in rational thinking, which makes them that much more pernicious. Consider this: 63 percent of registered American voters believe in at least one political conspiracy theory, according to a recent poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University.

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief.

It’s been a hot time for hoaxing thanks to the Internet. With Photoshop, citizen journalism sites, YouTube, and postboards for the latest photo leaks, it is way too easy to send a lie half way around the world before the truth can pull its shoes on.

This iconic image of the Lock Ness monster was hoaxed by Hugh Gray in 1933. (source)

In this post, I wrote about a busy week in paranormal-themed news. In chatting with a correspondent — Jeb Card, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department of Miami University — over a shared interest in the state of the paranormal today or “occulture,” we got to talking about the state of hoaxing.

Make no mistake, hoaxing has always been around. Hoaxers have been trying to fool people by displaying their special skills (scams) or stupendous stories since the beginning of civilization, I think. But there is a particular history of hoaxing in occulture. Lately, it has gotten more frequent (or we sure notice it more), more absurd (to outdo the last one) and more involved (because the payout can be big while the scrutiny greater).

There are many famous hoaxes from this scene. It’s hard to say if it’s more common now than in the past. Some of the hoaxes, notes Jeb, have been very influential in the creation of popular folklore. Big ones have defined UFOlogy: Roswell and the Men in Black. Not everyone would conclude these are deliberate hoaxes — there is a grain of truth to them — but they went way out of control and now there are hoaxed videos, documents and tales based on these events that never happened the way the lore says it did. Stories like that, which have taken on a life of their own as if they were true, are called “fakelore.”

The Bigfoot field is trampled over with fake footprints, stories, casts, photos and videos. It can’t be denied that the majority of Bigfoot stories are unbelievable, without supporting evidence, or obvious hoaxes. Every new bit of Bigfoot “evidence” these days makes us roll our eyes and say “SERIOUSLY!?” This reputation is damaging to those who truly believe something is out there to be found. The credibility of Bigfoot researchers scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The history of hoaxes colors this topic deeply when we realize that the seminal story of “Bigfoot,” Ray Wallace’s trackway, was revealed to be a hoax.

Actually, the same can be said for the Loch Ness Monster. The iconic Nessie photo — the long-neck arching out of the rippling water — was hoaxed.

A longtime follower of the occulture fields, Jeb says he can’t think of a time when these communities weren’t awash with . . .

Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

It’s been a busy week in the world of the weird. Not a good one for those who hope to see the dawn of new worldviews or a shift in the paradigm. In one week, three stories topped the abnormal news headlines — all three hyped stories fell apart.

While the stories are still unfolding, it’s clear that they turned out to be nothing as promised.

Click image to view the faked monster hump video.

First, there was this video of a lake creature swimming among boaters supposedly in Lough Foyle in Ireland. The video, taken by students one of which has the suggestive name Conall Melarkey, shows a hump moving rapidly through the water. The story gained widespread attention. The problem is that no animal can swim this way, no animal looks like this and, in consideration of the circumstances, the best explanation is that someone is towing a hump through the water. In all respects, this video is unbelievable. That is, it appears to be faked.

This second story is a bit more “inside baseball.” Many people will remember the Georgia Bigfoot Hoax of 2008 when two men, including Rick Dyer, teamed up with Bigfoot tracker Tom Biscardi to announce to the world they had a Bigfoot body in a freezer. There was even a press conference where Tom was adamant this was not a hoax, it was “the real deal.” Well, it was a hoax. Hard to fathom how a rubber suit with animal entrails would fool anyone for very long.

Rick has been telling anyone who will listen yet again that he has another Bigfoot body. This beast he supposedly shot during filming of a documentary called Shooting Bigfoot. The majority of Bigfoot enthusiasts did not buy it — once bitten, twice shy — and berated Dyer for his claims and his pay-per-view antics. The movie has come out and… there’s no body. But ever the profiteer, Dyer is still looking for money even though he says he is quitting the ‘footer world.’ Bye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

It was a “road to Damascus” experience for the Mad Men era. In 1966, the respected astronomer J. Allen Hynek had gone—seemingly overnight—from a determined debunker to an ardent apostle of the UFO gospel. A longtime consultant to Project Blue Book noted for his skeptical stance toward UFOs, Hynek suddenly began telling anyone who would listen that the UFO phenomenon merited serious scientific scrutiny. The great director Stanley Kubrick was among the many who listened. In a 1968 Playboy interview promoting his science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick spoke approvingly of what he termed Hynek’s “belated but exemplary conversion” (Phillips 2001, 58).

In fact, the professor’s apparent trans­formation from skeptic to UFO proponent was not quite the conversion event that it appeared on the surface. Since his teens Hynek had been an enthusiastic though closeted student of the occult. The French-born Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist and UFO author, was one of the few persons who knew Hynek’s secret. Hynek once told Vallee that he had become an astron­omer in order to discover “the very limitations of science, the places where it broke down, the phenomena it didn’t explain” (Vallee 1996, 232). Nonethe­less, the scientist’s public U-turn gave a big boost to the UFO movement, lending it a measure of credibility, and made Hynek into a celebrity as the nation’s “foremost expert on flying saucers” (O’Toole 1966). For two decades people could point to Hynek and say, “He’s a trained scientist, an astronomer no less: if even he believes in this UFO stuff then there must be something to it.”

On the evening of July 2, 1947, several witnesses in and near Roswell, New Mexico, observed a disc-shaped object moving swiftly in a northwesterly direction through the sky. The following morning Mac Brazel, foreman of a ranch located near tiny Corona, New Mexico, rode out on horseback to move sheep from one field to another. Accompanying him was a young neighbor boy, Timothy D. Proctor. As they rode, they came upon strange debris — various-size chunks of metallic material — running from one hilltop, down an arroyo, up another hill, and running down the other side. To all appearances some kind of aircraft had exploded.

In fact Brazel had heard something that sounded like an explosion the night before, but because it happened during a rainstorm (though it was different from thunder), he had not looked into the cause. Brazel picked up some of the pieces. He had never seen anything like them. They were extremely light and very tough.

By the time events had run their course, the world would be led to believe that Brazel had found the remains of a weather balloon. For three decades, only those directly involved in the incident would know this was a lie. And in the early 1950s, when an enterprising reporter sought to re-investigate the story, those who knew the truth were warned to tell him nothing.

Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles north west of Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The debris was identified as that of a radar target.

The cover-up did not begin to unravel until the mid-1970s, when two individuals who had been in New Mexico in 1947 separately talked with investigator Stanton T. Friedman about what they had observed. One, an Albuquerque radio station employee, had witnessed the muzzling of a reporter and the shutting down of an in-progress teletyped news story about the incident. The other, an Army Air Force intelligence officer, had led the initial recovery operation. The officer, retired Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, stated flatly that the material was of unearthly origin.

The uncovering of the truth about the Roswell incident — so called because it was from Roswell Field, the nearest Air Force base, that the recovery operation was directed — would be an excruciatingly difficult process. It continues to this day, even after publication of three books and massive documentation gleaned from interviews with several hundred persons as well as other evidence. Besides being the most important case in UFO history — the one with the potential not to settle the issue of UFOs but to identify them as extraterrestrial spacecraft — the Roswell incident is also the most fully investigated. The principal investigators have been Friedman, William L. Moore (coauthor of the first of the books, The Roswell Incident [1980]), Kevin D. Randle, and Donald R. Schmitt. Randle and Schmitt, associated with the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), authored the most comprehensive account so far, UFO Crash at Roswell (1991). From this research, the outlines of a complex, bizarre episode have emerged.

Six former members of Congress, who were paid $20,000 each, heard testimony on the U.S. government trying to cover up contact made with extraterrestrial life.

Jane Stevens explains her ‘third eye’ headband to the board of six former members of Congress.

Aliens may not exist, but millions of Americans think they do. And after more than 40 years, they’re finally getting a congressional hearing. Sort of.

On Monday, six former members of Congress, who were paid $20,000 each, plus expenses, heard testimony in a setting designed to resemble a Capitol Hill hearing room.

The goal: to prove that the U.S. government has covered up contact with extraterrestrial life.

For several hours, “UFOlogists” like Stanton Friedman, who calls himself the “original civilian investigator” of a supposed alien encounter in Roswell, N.M., in 1947, testified about extraterrestrial visits to Earth and an alleged conspiracy to suppress the truth about them.

“A flying saucer crashed and was retrieved by the government,” Friedman said of the Roswell episode.

“It’s clear that the materials were like nothing from this planet and it’s clear there was a coverup. . . Aliens are visiting, governments are lying.”

A UFO “truth” organization called the Paradigm Research Group is spending $600,000 — reportedly donated by a Canadian oil baron — to stage the week-long hearing and videotape the testimony for a documentary.

It’s the same group that filed a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website in 2011 urging President Obama to “formally acknowledge an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.”The petition received more than 50,000 signatures and an official White House response:

“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race. In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

But Paradigm’s executive director, Stephen Bassett, isn’t buying it. He said he’s out to force leaders in the U.S. to “acknowledge the E.T. presence.”

As the film opens, we see Greer going into a college auditorium in Santa Monica, the audience being checked with metal detectors for weapons. “Most people don’t know what a Dead Man Trigger is.” Very few people need one. But Greer has one – if the Conspiracy rubs him out, lots of sensitive documents get sent out to influential people. Excuse me while I barf – If Greer actually had any documents as hot as all that, he would have given them to the press long ago.

Greer’s Dead Alien

Most of what we see after that comes in no particular order. We are given UFO cases and UFO witnesses in a popcorn sort of manner, no sooner does one bounce up than it falls back and another takes its place. There is no time (or need) for exposition, or analysis. Every case, and every claim, is apparently completely solid and needs no further explanation or proof. The “organization” of the film was such that one could have taken almost any segment of it, and switched it with any other, and the change would scarcely be noticed. Some things that we are shown, for the most part quite briefly, include, in no particular order:

These supposed “inventors,” plus the ET technology, offers us unlimited Free Energy, but a conspiracy by those Greer calls the “Petro-fascists” keeps us using coal, oil, and nuclear power. Part of the Conspiracy is to keep us distracted by other things. Even Honey Boo-Boo is depicted as part of the Conspiracy to keep us distracted from ET truths.

Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it’s time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.

If you’re new to the exciting world of conspiracy theories and just can’t decide which paranoid delusion best suits you, then why not use this handy flowchart to find your ideal conspiracy theory. Then you too can go and stick it to THE MAN.

I always find conspiracy theories to be the most interesting aspect of the information age. The thought process fascinates me. I also love to see how conspiracy thinking breeds conspiracy thinking. There was a national telephone survey questioning 1247 registered US voters on 20 of the “Most Famous” conspiracy theories The response was, lets say, entertaining.

In no particular order.

13% President Barack Obama is the “Anti-Christ”

14% 1980′s Crack Cocaine epidemic was created by the CIA.

30% believe aliens visit us.

21% of voters say a UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up.

28% of voters believe secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.

Voters are split 44%-45% on whether Bush intentionally misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

9% of voters think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health)

4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power.

51% of voters say a larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination, just 25% say Oswald acted alone

14% of voters believe in Bigfoot.

15% of voters say the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals

5% believe exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons

15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money.

Just 5% of voters believe that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966.

6% of voters believe Osama bin Laden is still alive.

28% of voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

7% of voters think the moon landing was faked

20% of voters believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism.

37% of voters believe global warming is a hoax.

11% of voters believe the US government allowed 9/11 to happen.

To be generous this is a small number of people and may not be representative of the US as a whole. MY TAKE ON THE FINDINGS:

President Obama been pretty ineffective as the Anti-Christ, I mean a whole first term and no nuclear holocaust. I guess you also have to believe in Christ to be concerned about the anti-Christ.

Crack epidemic Sure why not? I mean all government agencies love it when their funding is stolen by competing departments…DEA?

Aliens? Possible but I think it is nothing more than human arrogance that makes us believe that we would be interesting to advanced cultures.